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These sorts of incidents make me wonder why we even care about "democratizing" these countries. It's clear that they're stuck in the Middle Ages, and I don't th

These sorts of incidents make me wonder why we even care about "democratizing" these countries. It's clear that they're stuck in the Middle Ages, and I don't think any amount of intervention is going to change that. You can't forcibly change an entire culture by throwing money and soldiers at it. Seems to me the right thing to do is to make it as easy and seamless as possible for those who share our views to leave their countries and come to America. It's not like we have any shortage of space in this country, and as long as the people we bring are contributing to the economy and have a modern value system, it can only be a good thing for us too.

RyanMcGreal 14y ago
Afghanistan was a modern, progressive country in the 1960s. It has devolved into a paranoid backwater after decades of attacks, occupation and other meddling by external powers - first the USSR and then the USA. Let's recall that the Taliban were formed out of the [terrorists|freedom fighters] that were trained by the Pakistani ISI and financed by the CIA to undermine the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > Afghanistan was a modern, progressive country in the 1960s. As was Iran. But they didn't get there because of Western intervention back then, and there's no reason to think that it would work now.
- tokenadult 14y ago
  Afghanistan was a modern, progressive country in the 1960s. I am old enough to remember the 1960s, and accounts from people who traveled to Afghanistan in the 1960s, and I would like to see more evidence for this extraordinary claim. Until I see the evidence you kindly provide, I will be hard put to believe that "modern, progressive" is as appropriate a designation for Afghanistan at any time in the last 500 years as it has been for, say, Denmark all that while. AFTER EDIT: Thanks for the first reply from new user gongador linking to a photo essay I remember seeing not too long ago. I had that photo essay in mind as I described "Afghanistan was a modern, progressive country in the 1960s" as an extraordinary claim, as I think the photo essay shows by concentrating its description of Afghanistan only on the largest urban center of the country, rather than the rural countryside seen by other travelers. The majority of the population of Afghanistan have never lived in Kabul, and illiteracy has always been high there, especially among girls and women.
  - gongador 14y ago
    Here's one viewpoint: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a_time_in_afghanistan http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a...
    - gongador 14y ago
      I agree, it's hardly representative of the whole country, which is why I referred to the photo essay as a viewpoint rather than claiming that (the whole of) Afghanistan was a modern progressive country in the 1960s. I have no knowledge of what life in Afghanistan was like in the 1960s, I just remembered reading this essay and looking at the photos some time ago. If I recall history lessons from school correctly, customs and habits formed by a country's elite (most often in the country's capital) tend to spread and be mimicked around said country. I wonder what life in rural Afghanistan would have been like today had not the USSR and the USA got involved. EDIT: Sigh, this should have been an edit in my previous comment of course.
  - batista 14y ago
    >I am old enough to remember the 1960s, and accounts from people who traveled to Afghanistan in the 1960s, and I would like to see more evidence for this extraordinary claim. Go read some books then. That they had religion and that they didn't had rock n' roll and modern luxuries didn't mean they were not a progressive, tolerant country compared to what it has become today. It's not about literacy and poor living in villages either. It's about living in a tolerant go-about-your business place and a civil-war/starvation/religious nuts running the show place.
laic 14y ago
The unfortunate truth is the world has been very much connected politically and economically ever since WWII, and more so every single day. What happens in those shitholes will eventually come back to U.S. in some way or another. So Obama's appeasement and apology approach really won't work very well, because sooner or later you have to deal with the shit that you were trying to avoid for so hard.
- whyhellothere 14y ago
  I'm not sure if Obama has an appeasement and apology approach (1), or were you just talking about this specific incident? 1. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/bush-obama-war-on-terror/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/bush-obama-war-on-t...
mmanfrin 14y ago
You're right, a riot where 4 people are killed is indicative of the country being stuck in the Middle Ages. Likewise, Brevik and the Aurora shooter killed 20x this, each; must mean that Norway and the US are stuck in the Mesolithic era. /s
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  Oh please, the incidents in Norway and America are very rare occurrences compared to the daily violence in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq.
  - mindstab 14y ago
    Maybe Norway, but are you kidding about America? There are tons of shootings in America all the time. Not all are big mass mutli killings. That's how you know there's a problem, merely 4 people dying probably wouldn't even make the news. There was recently that one where some white supremicist stormed a sikh temple and shot people. That's just the most recent one in my memory, wasn't that a few weeks ago.
    - w1ntermute 14y ago
      Hyperbole doesn't help anyone. Sure, America is a lot more violent than Western Europe, but both America and Western Europe are so much less violent than a veritable warzone like Afghanistan that even trying to claim otherwise doesn't achieve anything productive.
      - mmanfrin 14y ago
        That's because Afghanistan was a warzone and still is; but to make snide aspersions as to where these nations are 'stuck' based off of acts of wanton violence is wrong and belies a blind hypocrisy.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
You have made a common mistake of conflating 'democracy' with 'intolerance.' The fundamental issue is that you've got people in place A who have different moral values and rules than people in place B, The folks in place B worry their values will be destroyed by access to the media from place A. In this example the folks in strict Islamic nations are upset over a film which mocks the key figure in their religion. In the US devout Christians had much the same sort of anger over films that portrayed inter-racial marriage (and the implied intimacy). A few of the radical Christian clerics exhort their followers to violence in defense of their Christian beliefs under fire by their perception of an increasingly amoral society. Has nothing to do with democracy, middle ages, or religion and everything to do with what are, and what are not, those so called inalienable rights that the insurgents talked about their independence manifesto. Driving a consensus on this issue is Hard Problem(tm) which the UN and others have been working on pretty much from the start.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > You have made a common mistake of conflating 'democracy' with 'intolerance.' The reason why I've conflated them is because democracy is almost always a prerequisite for tolerance. Sure, it's possible for a non-democratic country to be tolerant, but that is a rare abnormality. Moreover, the reason why I put the word "democratization" in scare quotes in my previous post is because I was also using it with the underlying meaning that exists in America - "to transplant our culture/values into another country".
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    Not sure if I can agree with 'democracy' (which I believe you're using equating to the US style of representation) is a prerequisite for tolerance. The Dutch have had a monarchy that was pretty tolerant on a lot of things for a while (just as an example of it not being required). I'd be Ok with saying that democratically formed governments are more likely to be tolerant because tolerance works toward enhancing the number of votes they can get. But your second comment is scary indeed. "transplanting our culture/values", especially when it comes to US culture and values, is an offensive thing to a lot of people in the world. The US State department pushes exactly one 'value' (and no 'culture') which is that the people who are governed have the right of electing the government they want. Period. There aren't any constraints put on the kind of government the people pick, be it heavily church influenced, strict representation, constitutional representation, etc.
rz2k 14y ago
We'll never know because we put in just enough forces to achieve a tactical victory, but I suspect it would have been a different story if say 150,000 troops for 10 years were traded for 500,000 troops for three years. In a mostly illiterate society I suspect the entire way of thinking behind things like honor killings has a shakier foundation than we would suspect. If over the period of turning from a 10 year old into a 13 year old, or from 13 to 16 the Taliban were a joke, you would notice, and when the American troops were gone you would still remember that they were not cool. The cause is lost because a decade of little boys growing up think that fighting against occupiers is cooler, and whatever the leaders of those groups say must hold some weight. If instead they learned to read, so that they had access to enough thinking to realize how small their elders' minds were, or if they learned math which is uncontroversial, but champions thinking over authority, they would have the foundation to overturn a tradition of validating cruelty and intolerance. Little kids are perceptive, and a few years of seeing intolerant elders and militants as losers, even if only for a small portion of their youth, may have made an immeasurable difference.

RyanMcGreal 14y ago

Afghanistan was a modern, progressive country in the 1960s. It has devolved into a paranoid backwater after decades of attacks, occupation and other meddling by external powers - first the USSR and then the USA. Let's recall that the Taliban were formed out of the [terrorists|freedom fighters] that were trained by the Pakistani ISI and financed by the CIA to undermine the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

w1ntermute 14y ago
> Afghanistan was a modern, progressive country in the 1960s. As was Iran. But they didn't get there because of Western intervention back then, and there's no reason to think that it would work now.
tokenadult 14y ago
Afghanistan was a modern, progressive country in the 1960s. I am old enough to remember the 1960s, and accounts from people who traveled to Afghanistan in the 1960s, and I would like to see more evidence for this extraordinary claim. Until I see the evidence you kindly provide, I will be hard put to believe that "modern, progressive" is as appropriate a designation for Afghanistan at any time in the last 500 years as it has been for, say, Denmark all that while. AFTER EDIT: Thanks for the first reply from new user gongador linking to a photo essay I remember seeing not too long ago. I had that photo essay in mind as I described "Afghanistan was a modern, progressive country in the 1960s" as an extraordinary claim, as I think the photo essay shows by concentrating its description of Afghanistan only on the largest urban center of the country, rather than the rural countryside seen by other travelers. The majority of the population of Afghanistan have never lived in Kabul, and illiteracy has always been high there, especially among girls and women.
- gongador 14y ago
  Here's one viewpoint: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a_time_in_afghanistan http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a...
  - gongador 14y ago
    I agree, it's hardly representative of the whole country, which is why I referred to the photo essay as a viewpoint rather than claiming that (the whole of) Afghanistan was a modern progressive country in the 1960s. I have no knowledge of what life in Afghanistan was like in the 1960s, I just remembered reading this essay and looking at the photos some time ago. If I recall history lessons from school correctly, customs and habits formed by a country's elite (most often in the country's capital) tend to spread and be mimicked around said country. I wonder what life in rural Afghanistan would have been like today had not the USSR and the USA got involved. EDIT: Sigh, this should have been an edit in my previous comment of course.
- batista 14y ago
  >I am old enough to remember the 1960s, and accounts from people who traveled to Afghanistan in the 1960s, and I would like to see more evidence for this extraordinary claim. Go read some books then. That they had religion and that they didn't had rock n' roll and modern luxuries didn't mean they were not a progressive, tolerant country compared to what it has become today. It's not about literacy and poor living in villages either. It's about living in a tolerant go-about-your business place and a civil-war/starvation/religious nuts running the show place.

laic 14y ago

The unfortunate truth is the world has been very much connected politically and economically ever since WWII, and more so every single day. What happens in those shitholes will eventually come back to U.S. in some way or another. So Obama's appeasement and apology approach really won't work very well, because sooner or later you have to deal with the shit that you were trying to avoid for so hard.

whyhellothere 14y ago
I'm not sure if Obama has an appeasement and apology approach (1), or were you just talking about this specific incident? 1. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/bush-obama-war-on-terror/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/bush-obama-war-on-t...

mmanfrin 14y ago

You're right, a riot where 4 people are killed is indicative of the country being stuck in the Middle Ages. Likewise, Brevik and the Aurora shooter killed 20x this, each; must mean that Norway and the US are stuck in the Mesolithic era. /s

w1ntermute 14y ago
Oh please, the incidents in Norway and America are very rare occurrences compared to the daily violence in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq.
- mindstab 14y ago
  Maybe Norway, but are you kidding about America? There are tons of shootings in America all the time. Not all are big mass mutli killings. That's how you know there's a problem, merely 4 people dying probably wouldn't even make the news. There was recently that one where some white supremicist stormed a sikh temple and shot people. That's just the most recent one in my memory, wasn't that a few weeks ago.
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    Hyperbole doesn't help anyone. Sure, America is a lot more violent than Western Europe, but both America and Western Europe are so much less violent than a veritable warzone like Afghanistan that even trying to claim otherwise doesn't achieve anything productive.
    - mmanfrin 14y ago
      That's because Afghanistan was a warzone and still is; but to make snide aspersions as to where these nations are 'stuck' based off of acts of wanton violence is wrong and belies a blind hypocrisy.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

You have made a common mistake of conflating 'democracy' with 'intolerance.' The fundamental issue is that you've got people in place A who have different moral values and rules than people in place B, The folks in place B worry their values will be destroyed by access to the media from place A. In this example the folks in strict Islamic nations are upset over a film which mocks the key figure in their religion. In the US devout Christians had much the same sort of anger over films that portrayed inter-racial marriage (and the implied intimacy). A few of the radical Christian clerics exhort their followers to violence in defense of their Christian beliefs under fire by their perception of an increasingly amoral society. Has nothing to do with democracy, middle ages, or religion and everything to do with what are, and what are not, those so called inalienable rights that the insurgents talked about their independence manifesto. Driving a consensus on this issue is Hard Problem(tm) which the UN and others have been working on pretty much from the start.

w1ntermute 14y ago
> You have made a common mistake of conflating 'democracy' with 'intolerance.' The reason why I've conflated them is because democracy is almost always a prerequisite for tolerance. Sure, it's possible for a non-democratic country to be tolerant, but that is a rare abnormality. Moreover, the reason why I put the word "democratization" in scare quotes in my previous post is because I was also using it with the underlying meaning that exists in America - "to transplant our culture/values into another country".
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Not sure if I can agree with 'democracy' (which I believe you're using equating to the US style of representation) is a prerequisite for tolerance. The Dutch have had a monarchy that was pretty tolerant on a lot of things for a while (just as an example of it not being required). I'd be Ok with saying that democratically formed governments are more likely to be tolerant because tolerance works toward enhancing the number of votes they can get. But your second comment is scary indeed. "transplanting our culture/values", especially when it comes to US culture and values, is an offensive thing to a lot of people in the world. The US State department pushes exactly one 'value' (and no 'culture') which is that the people who are governed have the right of electing the government they want. Period. There aren't any constraints put on the kind of government the people pick, be it heavily church influenced, strict representation, constitutional representation, etc.

rz2k 14y ago

We'll never know because we put in just enough forces to achieve a tactical victory, but I suspect it would have been a different story if say 150,000 troops for 10 years were traded for 500,000 troops for three years. In a mostly illiterate society I suspect the entire way of thinking behind things like honor killings has a shakier foundation than we would suspect. If over the period of turning from a 10 year old into a 13 year old, or from 13 to 16 the Taliban were a joke, you would notice, and when the American troops were gone you would still remember that they were not cool. The cause is lost because a decade of little boys growing up think that fighting against occupiers is cooler, and whatever the leaders of those groups say must hold some weight. If instead they learned to read, so that they had access to enough thinking to realize how small their elders' minds were, or if they learned math which is uncontroversial, but champions thinking over authority, they would have the foundation to overturn a tradition of validating cruelty and intolerance. Little kids are perceptive, and a few years of seeing intolerant elders and militants as losers, even if only for a small portion of their youth, may have made an immeasurable difference.